What is Data Analysis?

What is Data Analysis? Collecting data, reviewing the data, and making inferences from the data is data analysis. Analyzing data is important in continuous improvement. Data allows you to make sound decisions about the process, product or service.

This Data Analysis Video teaches you the basic tools for understanding, summarizing, and making future predictions with your collected data. Includes MS Excel templates.

What is Data analysis? It is a scientific approach to improvement. Simple data analysis comes down to two terms. I talk about these two terms on this page.

Data comes from everywhere. There is process data, product data, financial data, mechanical data, electrical data, and service data. Every organization improves with their own set of data. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

The best thing about data is that most data follows the same patterns. Simple statistics can be used to analyze the data. The term statistics seems to scare people. But really, it is quite simple and data analysis in excel is easy.

Let’s start with the types of data. There are two types of data.

Variable

Attribute

To answer the question - What is data analysis? You have to understand the difference between these two types of data.

Attribute Data

Attribute data is go / no go, yes / no or good / bad. Attribute data tracks conformance vs nonconformance. It is used when classifying defects. For example, a manufacture that makes glassware may classify defects as broken glass, thin glass, scratches, misshaped, etc.

The result of a variable data measurement could be an attribute. Lets say your measuring the glass thickness and the glass measures below the specification for thickness. You call this defective glass as thin glass. You reject the glass for thin glass. Thin glass is an attribute.

Suppose you measure 100 glasses for thickness and 10 of them were thin class. Then the attribute data for the 100 glasses are 90 are good and 10 are defective for thin glass.

This Data Analysis Video teaches you the basic tools for understanding, summarizing, and making future predictions with your collected data. Includes MS Excel templates.

Normal Distribution

There is a curve driven on the data set. This curve is called a bell shape curve because it looks like a musical bell instrument.

When the data has a bell shape curve we call this normal distribution.

When we have normal distribution we can calculate the standard deviation of the sample. Standard deviation measures the spread of the data about the mean. It tells us the width of the bell shape curve.

The two terms - What is data analysis?

What is data analysis? We now have 2 statistics that describes our data set. The first is the mean and the other is standard deviation. The mean tells us the center of our data. The standard deviation tells us the spread of the data.

Mean and standard deviation are the most common terms when it comes to data analysis. Understanding these two terms and normal distribution are basic tools for process improvement. This allows us to apply many other tools to making improvement.

This Data Analysis Video teaches you the basic tools for understanding, summarizing, and making future predictions with your collected data. Includes MS Excel templates.